People are ridiculous actors; you cannot beat them when it comes to feigning their emotions. When you think they are happy, they might not have an inkling of joy running within them. In instances when you think they have lost hope, they might not be thinking about sadness at all. Hence, understanding the real feeling of people always become as hard as breaking into a rock. However, this doesn’t mean it is impossible to identify feigned emotion. According to vocabulary.com, feigned is an adjective that means “not genuine” like your feigned interest in your friends’ discussion of celebrity hairstyle trends. That is, not having interest in a thing but making false appearance as if you’re really interested in it.
The word feigned, pronounce “faynd,” comes from the Old French word feign, which means “pretend, imitate, shirk.” Feigned emotions aren’t real, and therefore, they are a bit dishonest. You act like you care but you really don’t. Maybe you are just being nice, like your feigned enthusiasm for your dad’s woodworking projects — you know how much he enjoys it, so why not act interested? (vocabulary.com, 2018). A criminal suspect who is not sorry about a crime they committed will feign regret so as to be released while some other ones will even show their ‘ignorance’ about the crime.
Of all emotions, smile is always the most feigned. There are two forms of smiles—fake and genuine. The distinction between the two has been of great interest to researchers since few decades ago. In fact, the genuine smile has a name. It’s called the “Duchenne smile,” named after the French physician Guillaume Duchenne, who studied the physiology of facial expressions in the nineteenth century. The Duchenne smile involves both voluntary and involuntary contraction from two muscles: the zygomatic major (raising the corners of the mouth) and the orbicularis oculi (raising the cheeks and producing crow’s feet around the eyes) (Harrison, 2010).
A fake smile or, as Harrison likes to call it, a “Say Cheese” smile involves the contraction of just the zygomatic major since we cannot voluntarily contract the orbicularis oculi muscle. Scientists have discovered that these two types of smiles are actually controlled by two completely different parts of our brain.
When a patient with damage to the motor cortex on the brain’s left hemisphere attempts to smile, the smile is asymmetrical, with the right side of the smile not moving as it should. However, when that same patient spontaneously laughs, the smile is normal with no asymmetry. This means that the genuine smile is controlled by some other part of the brain. Now, when a patient with damage to the anterior cingulate (part of the limbic system) in the left hemisphere attempts to smile, there is no asymmetry. The smile is normal. However, when that same patient tries to smile spontaneously, the asymmetry appears. Thus, the Say Cheese smile is controlled by the motor cortex while emotion-related movements, like the Duchenne smile, is controlled by the limbic system (the emotional center of the brain). (Harrsion, 2010).
Ferber (2013) notes that distressed expressions—sadness, fear, anger and sometimes, surprise are the hardest to fake compared with smile. These expressions cause tension throughout the face as one part of the brain tries to control an expression caused by another part of the brain. These expressions also rely on antagonistic muscle groups, pulling parts of the face in opposing directions. For example, sadness often involves both an expression of sadness and the desire to control that expression. According to Dr. Mark Frank, Professor in Department of Communication at the University of Buffalo, “The tug of war over your face creates the quivering lip” (Ferber, 2013).
Similarly, when a face demonstrates fear, surprise pulls the eyebrows up while stress knits the brows together, resulting in the inner corners of the eyebrows raising slightly. Fear involves more muscles in the top of the face than other emotions. There is much less neural connection to the forehead, the eyebrows and the upper eyelids than to the lower muscles in the face, so it becomes hard for us to voluntarily control them (Ferber, 2013).
What many people don’t know is that facial expressions are different from reactions. A reaction like a knee jerk is in response to sensory stimuli and activates motor responses, bypassing the brain. In contrast, body cues and facial expressions demonstrating emotion are brain based, meaning they can be controlled to a certain extent, even if we aren’t very good at it. So, there is no one who can masterfully feign emotions except it is done to an unobservant person. Dr. Hillel Aviezer, a professor in the Department of Psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, while contributing to this subject matter notes that “Recreating the expression without feeling the emotion can be tricky. Many people are poor posers of expressions; they simply don’t know what to move where.”Not to mention, it’s almost impossible to imitate unique characteristics of sadness or fear, like tears or sweat (Ferber, 2013).
But emotion isn’t all in the face. Recent studies revealed that while our basic understanding of emotional expression comes from the face, we demonstrate a lot of what we’re feeling through the rest of our body as well. When we feel particularly intense emotions the body becomes a better indicator for emotion, especially in the context of victory and defeat. So, while the person faking it would only focus on their facial look, you that you want to uncover the falsehood must look beyond the conventional face and focus on the entire body (Ferber, 2013).
The most known set of people who do fake their emotions are psychopaths. Robert Hare defines a psychopath as: “A social predator who often charms and manipulates his or her way through life. Psychopaths are completely lacking in conscience and in feelings for others; they take what they want and do as they please without the slightest sense of guilt or regret.”Probably the most significant characteristic of all, lack of empathy means that psychopaths are unable to understand and identify with the feelings of others. There is a cold lack of interest in someone else’s pain or discomfort (Olivia, 2018).
References
Ferber, E (2013). FYI: Which Emotion is the Hardest to Fake? Retrieved from https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-05/fyi-which-emotion-hardest-fake
Harrison, A (2010). What Science Has To Say About Genuine vs. Fake Smiles. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/thriving101/201001/what-science-has-say-about-genuine-vs-fake-smiles
Olivia, R (2018). How to Recognize a Psychopath. Retrieved from https://www.health24.com/Mental-Health/Disorders/How-to-recognise-a-psychopath-20120721
vocabulary.com (2018). Feigned. Retrieved from https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/feigned
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